God as the ground of being cannot be conceived of. Nirvana also cannot be conceived of. If we are aware when we use the word ‘nirvana’ or the word ‘God’ that we are talking about the ground of being there is no danger in using these words.
For Thich Nhat Hanh, “ground of being” is the deepest expression of the reality of divinity.
BY MATTHEW FOX
MARCH 22, 2023
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The phrase ‘the Ground of Being’ came to the attention of a number of people owing to the fact that John Robinson, then the Bishop of Woolwich, used it in his Honest to God (London, 1964) as a way of speaking of a God who is not ‘up there’ or ‘out there’. ‘Ground’ in ordinary speech certainly suggests something ‘down there’, though ‘down’ is of course as much a spatial metaphor as ‘up’. But the metaphor also seems to offer a way of talking about ‘Being’ as something in which we are somehow ‘grounded’ without having to imagine ‘a Being’ apart from the world. Paul Tillich was the philosophical theologian to whom Robinson was indebted for this way of thinking.
Emmet, D. (1998). ‘The Ground Of Being’. In: Outward Forms, Inner Springs. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
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For Tillich, God is being-itself, not a being among other beings. To describe the relationship between being-itself and finite beings, Tillich takes the word, "ground."
Being and God in Paul Tillich (1886-1965): Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology
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I find the common understanding of God to be problematic. Christian theology has to go through all kinds of contortions to explain evil in the world. With God not being a basis of their worldview, Buddhists don't have as much of a problem. A friend said offhandedly in a group that Buddhists says life is suffering. I find that a distortion as the noble truth acknowledges that there is suffering and how to resolve it. That is so much better than original sin and thinking there is a division of good and evil rather than that we are all capable of evil.
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